Nation/world news in brief

Wednesday

PARIS — French investigators may be closer to solving the deadly 2009 crash of an Air France flight after the recovery early Tuesday of the cockpit voice recorder from deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

The recorder was hauled up hours after investigators located it, according to France’s air accident investigator, the BEA. The plane’s flight-data recorder was pulled out on Sunday after its discovery by a submersible working at 12,800 feet below the ocean’s surface.

Experts have said without the two recorders — commonly known as “black boxes” — there would be almost no chance of determining what caused the June 1, 2009, crash of Flight 447, which killed all 228 people on board in the worst disaster in Air France’s history. The flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris slammed into the Atlantic northeast of Brazil after running into an intense high-altitude thunderstorm.

“If the black boxes are readable, in three weeks we can hope to know part of the truth,” Transport Minister Thierry Mariani said on RTL radio.

BEA chief Jean-Paul Troadec said that the two pieces of equipment could allow experts to piece together a timeline of what happened to the plane’s systems, and the crew’s reaction.

JAIPUR, India — A court has convicted a 16-year-old American of killing his mother while on vacation in western India because he was traumatized by his parents’ divorce.

Prosecutor A.K. Sankhla said the boy was sentenced Tuesday to serve three years in an Indian juvenile detention facility for attacking Cindy Iannarelli in August 2010.

Police said the boy slit his mother’s throat and left the wrapped body on a sand dune near the Osian resort in Rajasthan state. He was arrested at the airport. The knife was never found, but police said they recovered the boy’s bloodied clothes.

The teenager has denied the charges. It was not immediately clear if his lawyer would appeal.

The Pennsylvania resident cannot be named because he is a minor.

His father, G. Richard Patton, a business professor at the University of Pittsburgh, would not speak about the verdict or confirm his son’s name, which was widely reported before the boy’s case was turned over to a juvenile court.

JACKSON, Miss. — A lawyer for a Mississippi school district says it’s complying with a federal desegregation order, even though the Justice Departments claims in court documents the district is not doing enough.

Jamie Jacks, who represents the school district in Cleveland, Miss., said federal officials toured the district in 2008. Since then, school officials have provided regular reports on integration efforts. Jacks said that of the district’s 10 schools, six have a significantly integrated population.

But in court documents filed Monday, the Justice Department claimed the district had failed to dismantle the vestiges of segregation of its schools, something it was ordered to do in 1969.

The department said schools on the west side of the railroad tracks are disproportionately white and schools on the east side are predominantly black.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A West Virginia man found wearing women’s underwear and standing over a goat’s carcass told police he was high on bath salts.

Mark L. Thompson of Alum Creek was arrested at his home Monday. A criminal complaint in Kanawha County Magistrate Court charges the 19-year-old with cruelty to animals.

Sheriff’s Deputy J.S. Shackelford said witnesses reported Thompson standing near a neighbor’s pygmy goat in a bedroom. Thompson was wearing a bra and female underwear. The goat had at least one stab wound.

Cpl. Sean Snuffer said Thompson indicated he had been high and “wasn’t in his right mind.”

Thompson was held on $50,000 bond Tuesday at the South Central Regional Jail.

Jail records didn’t indicate whether he had a lawyer and no listed phone number was available.

HAVANA — Cubans’ morning joe is getting a little more bitter and a little less potent. The island is once again mixing coffee with roasted peas in a cost-saving move.

An announcement in the Communist Party newspaper Granma says the new blend is being distributed for domestic consumption beginning this month.

Coffee for export will continue to be pure.

Cubans are accustomed to drinking coffee cut with peas, which was the norm here until 2005.

Some even complained when they started getting the pure stuff, saying it tasted funny.

Local cafés were still selling supplies of pure coffee Tuesday.

From Associated Press reports.

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